Today's DDoS attacks are child's play, compared to what's coming

The future of DDoS attacks is grim, indeed.

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The highly powerful DDoS attacks we’ve been witnessing lately will look like children’s play, compared to what’s coming. This grim prediction was made by DDoS security solutions firm Corero Network Security. It has observed a new zero-day DDoS attack vector, which it says has the potential to change how we see DDoS attacks.

It says the new technique is an ‘amplification attack’ where Lightweight Directory Access Protocol is leveraged. By leveraging an amplification factor seen at a peak of as much as 55 times, this technique has the potential to create some serious pain. “We could soon see new records broken in the DDoS attack landscape”, the company writes in a press release, saying we’re not so far away from Terabits per second attacks.

“This new vector may represent a substantial escalation in the already dangerous DDoS landscape, with potential for events that will make recent attacks that have been making headlines seem small by comparison,” says Dave Larson, CTO/COO at Corero Network Security.

“When combined with other methods, particularly IoT botnets, we could soon see attacks reaching previously unimaginable scale, with far-reaching impact. Terabit scale attacks could soon become a common reality and could significantly impact the availability of the Internet– at least degrading it in certain regions.”

Amplification techniques allow hackers to intensify their attacks’ size, as LDAP server responses are larger than the attacker’s queries. The usual amplification factor is 44 times, reaching up to 55 times at a peak.